The nation between the lines. Invisible media, implicit discourse and invention of tradition by the Transylvanian Saxons

Communities imagine themselves (Anderson, Hobsbawm, Gellner), but how is the invention spread and transformed into collective identity? This communication theory of nation clarifies the blurred concept of invention of tradition by distinguishing invention, transmission by a media (F. d'Almedia, J. Assmann), and transformation of invention into tradition, of present into past. The hypothesis is that the most important is not being said: the message is implicit and the media is invisible as such. Implicit meaning allows a naturalization that appeals in part to the unconscious - the guarantor of the nation's intangibility (C. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, M. Douglas).

Transylvanian Saxons, a German minority in Romania, chose collective emigration to Germany in 1990. With a beginning in the 12th century, an end in the 21st century, and identity transformations in a world first multicultural, then tending to monoculturality, and today to transculturality, they are a particularly relevant field observation. Studies of their historiography, museum, church and mountain club show that they have between the lines reinvented time, public space and territory, while the implicit froze time, sanctified society and geologyzed'' the territory.

According to Karl W. Deutsch, a population is a community of communication who exchanges intensively more to the inside than the outside. Thus, a bridge is being built between the theories of nations and nationalism and communication studies. The different forms of implicit steer invisibly the national construction, the maintain of Nation-states and also of dictatorships with disturbing similarities between nations and eras.